Authors: Mark Wisniewski
DEESH
WHAT GETS ME IS
that once I step into the boat, the cool, who-gives-a-shit white dude who so smoothly
called me a killer has now turned into a talker. And I don’t mean a veteran wisecracker
like James. I mean more of the nervous type, a guy who can go off on a blue streak
so long you wonder if he’s got problems worse than yours.
And in his case I mean mental problems. Or, I guess, emotional. The kind Madalynn
would have called “issues.”
Like right off the bat he goes on and on about how I should watch my balance and be
careful not to fall in and that, of course, I have the gun so I can sit where I want
but that, in his opinion, I should take the smallest seat, near the front, as opposed
to the wide one in back, and he explains at least twice, the second time at great
length, that he’ll need to sit in the wide one in back because
the motor will hang off the back and he’ll need to turn the motor on and off and steer
us. “And, see, Deesh, the turning on and off of that motor will prove crucial to your
goal,” he explains, “because the catching of bass requires that you move along as
naturally as you can.” And then he takes pains, with a wince that won’t leave his
face, to explain how a guy can’t use a motor of either kind, electric or gas powered,
in stretches of the stream that aren’t deep enough, because, see, when the stream’s
going low you don’t want to obliterate your prop against river stones, and how we’ll
need to save battery power to get deep into the woods. It’s like he’s now all of a
sudden into fishing-guide mode, which you’d think would help him relax more about
the gun, but instead it’s got him all messed up like start-of-a-big-game jitters.
And the longer we sit like that, maybe eight feet apart, face-to-face, with me aiming
a gun at the heart of a man I can’t deny is a hostage—a gun that’s already let loose
a bullet to kill a cop—the more I get intensely freaked, too.
Then, on deeper water, he clicks off the motor and begins to row. He’s on another
blue streak, this one about how his sight isn’t perfect because of some “fucked-up
open-heart surgery,” and an odd twitch from inside me, like a shiver but up my belly
instead of down my spine, jolts the gun out of aim. I ease it back down toward his
mouth as he mentions as an aside that he’s on “several medications,” which makes me
wonder if, besides being in hyper fish-guide mode, the man is high. Brothers tripping
on painkillers have done wilder shit than they’d do after draining a night’s worth
of forties, so now, here, listening to Gabe, I’m back to using a motto coached into
me when I played ball: Defend, defend, defend, but always be set to shoot.
And it’s not until Gabe opens the tackle box and grabs a lure
and tosses it back in that I realize the twitch attacked me because I suspect this
guy is conning me. And I’m not thinking some everyday con like brothers hawking knockoffs
on Eighth Avenue. I’m thinking a con that came to his mind twenty minutes ago for
the purpose of turning me in, maybe killing me. As in the swindle of my life. As in
summer sunshine is now warming my knees and we are gliding up a stream through countryside
more beautiful than any I’ve seen on TV, with the
tat-tweet-tot
of a bird somewhere in branches ahead, but now I will never relax.
Then there’s an explosion of birdsong unlike any in the Bronx, Carnegie Hall birdsong,
a kind so loud and complex and glorious brothers like me never hear let alone see
the source of, and with Gabe going on about some theory of his, something about how
to catch big fish, I lean back and hold the gun over the water—so Gabe would need
to lunge farther to grab it—then check out the bird itself, which is gray as a mouse,
not tiny, not big, just a plain-assed gray bird bursting forth with this odd, bold,
loud jazz that, I swear, is all about freedom.
It’s messed up
is the riff this jazz keeps sliding back to.
Freedom looks pretty, but it’s all messed up.
JAN
AS TUG AND I WALKED
on the railroad tracks through the woods from the track to his parents��� house, he
faced the woods until I said, “You
are
set to cry. Is it about something he said to you?”
“Jan, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then just . . . listen to me, Tug. Because
I
want to talk.”
“Why?”
“Because I care about you and you care about him.”
“Then go ahead. Talk. Just remember: I’m predicting right now that you’ll end up calling
me a baby.”
“Why would I do that?”
“A guy cries and a woman at first believes he’s sensitive and as such a good catch,
but then she decides he’s a baby.”
And with that word—
baby
—now having been said more than once between us, we walked on as if there were nothing
left to say,
and I took the lead, letting my steps land between the rail bed’s weathered ties,
Tug on the soot-colored gravel just outside the rail on my right. We walked like this
for a long while, with Tug now and then sneaking peeks toward the woods, maybe to
look for his father, risking that I’d think he was again set to cry, concerned, I
was sure, that I was already deciding about him: about the way he’d be as a man thanks
to his father; about how his father’s quirks and habits and, damn, even his father’s
disappearance might manifest themselves in the person Tug would always be; about how
every good and bad trait of both of Tug’s parents might affect Tug’s potential; about
how maybe, right now, Tug and I, as a couple falling in love, were likely to face
the same troubles Tug’s parents had faced because we were horse people, too. I was
already also deciding, Tug probably thought then, about Tug’s Attitudes Toward Women
and Tug as a Possible Lover and Tug as a Simple Partner, maybe even Tug as a Future
Husband, and, what the heck, Maybe as a Father Too.
And I asked him, “Why would I think you’re a baby?”
And we walked. And we walked. And we walked.
“Because babies cry,” he finally said. “But that wasn’t my point, Jan. My point was
that you might believe you want a guy who cries, but you don’t.”
I studied the splintered ties, considering this.
I asked, “Are you figuring he won’t come back?”
“I told
you. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“He’s coming back, Tug. Mine never did after he got stuck in those weeds, but that
was different. I mean, be real with me, Tug. What are the odds that, with us being
this young,
both
of our fathers would leave us for good?”
He shrugged, as if here, this far from the grandstand, things like odds didn’t count.
“He’s coming back
,
Tug. He has to. How could he not? After seeing what my father’s absence did to me
and my mother?”
And for a while there, my silence had Tug appearing calm and well-adjusted, as if
I’d consoled him, and, for a few moments, I felt that I’d just made the only relevant
point. Then, maybe because I’d asked, maybe because he just wanted to be honest with
someone
, he came out and said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
And his voice went all quiet:
“I just—I just have a sick feeling.”
And he shrugged without glancing at me, even though he was now directly beside me,
making no bones about hiding his face.
Then, all male and female pride be damned, I said, “When you’re set to cry, Tug? You
should. Because if you don’t, bad things can happen.”
And then there I went, too, trying to spot a bird or squirrel or something alive other
than trees in those woods, wishing I could run off to someplace far from everything
that was happening to us.
And Tug let me do that. He let me look off for as long as I wanted.
Then he said, “What sort of bad things?”
And we faced each other, both of us frowning. We had this new mutual dead seriousness.
“Like your heart could go sour,” I said, and I remembered Tom’s recent speech about
heart and luck and losing. Had Tom really wanted both Tug and me to hear that speech—or
just Tug?
“Or
you’ll
run away,” I said now. “And never come back.”
“Who would I run from?”
“Your father. After he comes back. Or your mother. Or anyone else you might love.”
“Who said I ever loved anyone?”
“You love your father and you know it. And that’s the problem here, Tug. You got yourself
all wrapped up in pretending you don’t care about a guy who, given how he behaves,
cares only about placing bets on horses. That’s a big mess, Tug.”
And there, after I said that, I pretended I was captivated by something deep inside
the woods. To Tug I probably looked like I despised the world, and in a way I did,
because right then it hit me that there were plenty of folks now gossiping about the
Corcorans and me and my mother as viciously as people had gossiped back in Arkansas.
Then Tug said, “Just don’t ever call me a baby, okay?”
I smiled a little at that, with one of those smiles Tug knew all about, the kind that
force themselves on you when things feel at their worst.
And with that smile refusing to leave my face, I glanced over.
And I said, “Tug? If I’m with you and I happen to call you
baby
? Trust me—you won’t mind it at all.”
But what’s probably most important about this whole business of Tug not wanting to
be called a baby was something I learned the next day: that despite all the adulthood
and manliness Tug aspired to, he could not dismiss a rule Tom had declared for him
back when he’d been a kid, which was that if ever Tug and Tom were together in the
grandstand, Tug was to consider himself the Stay Putter and his father the Always
Come Backer. This rule, of course, was meant for whenever Tug felt lost; Tug was,
according to this rule, supposed to continue sitting or standing wherever he
and Tom had last spoken, then wait there confident of his father’s return.
And no doubt Tom had laid down this rule to keep them from chasing each other in circles,
but back then Tom never explained it to Tug as such, instead telling him that he should
take pride in any departure of his father—since Tug was the luckiest kid, since he
had a father whose eventual return was as certain as the fastest, most honest-running
sure-thing horse.
And sometimes back then, Tom would be gone long enough that a grandstander would ask
Tug if Tug was lost, and Tug would say
no, then say,
My dad is no loser,
and the grandstander would laugh hard, as if Tug had made the perfect joke, and then
Tom would return and the grandstander would recognize him from back when he’d jocked,
and they’d shake hands and ignore Tug and talk the highs and lows of the game.
As a result, when Tom’s disappearance had continued on into its second day and beyond,
Tug would spend his mornings in town or in the woods near the track looking for Tom,
but he then spent his afternoon hours in the grandstand, in that same upper-tier section
his father had claimed, the one overlooking The Crux. On the first day Tug did this—that
is, essentially,
wait
up there—I went with him, and as we sat there, right where his father had, he explained
to me, after I suggested we again check the backside, that he believed it was wisest
to follow his father’s advice to stay put. Whether he actually believed his father
would return and we’d all end up happy was something I quickly learned not to discuss,
because the one time I asked him about this he acted as if he hadn’t heard, just stood
and excused himself and headed off, to bet two of his father’s dollars on a long shot.
And while we watched that race, it occurred to me that Tug had
made that bet sentimentally, doing what his father would have done, almost, you could
say, as a surrogate, carrying on the Corcoran family tradition, and I did not in the
least want to mess with that, but it bothered me, and it bothered me all the more
when I admitted to myself that, as we sat up there watching horses run, the hard-core
grandstanders Tom had long known were obviously giving us the silent treatment.
Among these hard-cores I should probably mention now was The Nickster, a portly, clean-shaven
Sicilian who had once scowled at Tug and called him a pussy for caring about retired
horses—though now, with Tom gone, The Nickster would neither scowl nor react at all
when he’d see Tug. At most he’d lick his thumb and turn a page of his racing program
while letting his steely eyes drift.
There was also The Show Stopper, a gregarious loser who’d once famously bet ten grand
on “a lock to show” (his words), only to see it leave the gate and stop, and whose
gregariousness, now that Tom was gone, had suddenly pulled up lame, too.
And as always (in his usual place at the bottom of the pecking order), there was The
Form
Monger.
In fact, it was then, after Tom disappeared and Tug and I sat up there, that Tug finally
told me the whole story of the absence of The
Form
Monger’s wife, including the part about how The
Form
Monger’s compulsive betting had led her as well as his hand to disappear pathetically
forever. And what was odd was that, as Tug told me this story, all three of us—Tug
and I and The
Form
Monger—were all right there, all three of us up there in the flesh in the grandstand,
still making bets on horses despite the likelihood that, right then, as we gambled,
Tom Corcoran was very well facing his own gambling-related horrors.
I mean, here, smack in front of us, was a guy whose right arm
was a hideous purple stump because his attraction to betting had caused
his hand to be sawed off
, and he just kept cruising around in that grandstand in search of
Form
s, kept following losers out to the parking lot in case they’d drop anything—kept
on aspiring to stand out there and scalp used past performances and return to the
grandstand to bet.
And even though The
Form
Monger kept his distance from us, never once stepping foot in the section that overlooked
The Crux, Tug kept wanting to be near men like him.